Download Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission

A Series of Discussion Papers on Re-Imagining the Federal Budget Process
No. 3| January 2016
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
Barry Anderson and Rudy Penner
Executive Summary
The basic concepts underlying the U.S. government’s budget are in disarray. Consider that there is no
generally accepted practice about how to deal with such things as what the budget should include, how
spending and revenues are defined, or how the budget should be displayed to show the economic impact if
different forms of spending.
The 1967 Report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts addressed some of these issues and
led to some reforms, such as the unified budget. But many issues remain unresolved. It is time to create a
new Commission to address several budget concepts, including:
•
•
•
The scope of the budget. Some programs are “on budget” while others are “off budget.” Moreover, the
way the budget should treat government sponsored enterprises and other government-private
partnerships needs to be clarified.
Defining spending and revenue. The distinction between taxes and spending has become muddled
and needs to be addressed. For example, “tax expenditures” and “offsetting collections” should to be
defined more precisely and their placement in the budget reconsidered.
The economic impact of different types of spending. A new Commission needs to recommend
better ways of showing the impact of such things as government purchases of securities, trust funds,
capital investments, and loans or guarantees.
Although the topic of budget concepts may seem dry and technical to most Americans, and even
lawmakers, almost all of these issues are important economically and have an important political dimension.
How the budget is organized and its components are defined and represented gives a particular impression
about how much money government raises and spends, and what it does with that money. So clarifying the
way the budget is arranged and defining budget items has important implications.
The basic concepts underlying the U.S.
government’s budget are in disarray. Consider that
there are no generally accepted practices with
regard to several fundamental conceptual
questions. For example:
• What should be the scope of the budget?
Should it only include purely public activities
or should enterprises that mix public and
private goals also be included?
• How should spending and revenues be
defined? What is the proper treatment of tax
expenditures and the fees and premiums that
help finance public activities?
• What budgetary displays would help
policymakers and the public better understand
the budget and the economic impact of
different types of spending?
Such questions need to be addressed. But to help
understand how to address these questions, it is
important to start with an assessment of what
information the federal budget should be designed
to produce.
The Concept of the Budget
The 1967 Report of the President’s Commission
on Budget Concepts stated that the budget should
present the essential ingredients of the financial
plan of the federal government. In the
Commission’s words, “This plan has many aspects
and must serve many purposes:
•
•
•
•
•
•
It sets forth the President’s requests for new
programs, appropriation of funds, and
changes in revenue legislation;
It proposes an allocation of resources to
serve national objectives between the
private and the public sectors and within the
public sector;
It embodies the fiscal policy of the
government for promoting high employment,
price stability, healthy growth of the national
economy, and equilibrium in the Nation’s
balance of payments;
It provides the basis for executive and
agency management of federal government
programs;
It gives Treasury needed information for its
management of cash resources and the
public debt;
It provides the public with information about
the national economy essential for private
business, labor, agriculture, and other
groups, and for an informed assessment by
citizens of governmental stewardship of the
public’s money and resources.” 1
These purposes are as relevant today as they were
50 years ago. They need to be re-examined by a
new Commission on Budget Concepts.
The 1967 Commission’s report remains the
authoritative statement on federal budgetary
accounting concepts and principles. Like the
experience of many commissions, most of the
Commission’s recommendations were not adopted.
But the 1967 Commission did have one major
success. Based on its recommendation, the
Administration created the unified budget, which
was an important change in the scope of the
budget. Previously, the focus of the federal budget
was on the administrative budget and did not
include trust funds. The new unified budget,
however, included trust funds and thus provided a
more comprehensive measure of government
activities.
Prior to the Congressional Budget and
Impoundment Act of 1974, Congress did not have a
formal budget process of its own. The 1974 statute
created that process, and it also established the
Congressional Budget Office. The process created
in that year worked relatively well for a time, but it is
now completely broken. For instance, in recent
years it has proved difficult to pass an overall
budget plan, that is to say, a budget resolution as
called for in the 1974 legislation. Both houses of
Congress did manage to pass a resolution for fiscal
2016 for the first time in several years, but it was
violated before the ink was dry. Appropriations have
not been completed on time since 1994.
Several groups have examined the budget
process and recommended changes. 2 But we do
not believe that a new Commission on Budget
Concepts should deal with matters of process,
because such matters have a heavy political
content and need to be addressed by the
legislature. Thus proposals for process reform
should be dealt with by the budget committees and
the relevant issues should be resolved by the whole
Congress.
It is important, however, that any new process
designed by Congress should use appropriate and
consistent budget concepts. A Commission can
help achieve agreement on those.
Budget concepts are mainly technical, but they
do also have a political dimension in that a change
in conceptual definitions almost always makes
specific programs look more or less appropriate or
attractive. Consequently, to garner wide support for
its recommendations, the membership of a new
commission should be broadly representative of
both the community of budget technicians and
individuals from a variety of walks of life who can
help sell the commission recommendations
politically. The 1967 commission was appointed by
the president. But because the Congress now has
its own budget process, a new Commission on
Budget Concepts should be jointly appointed by the
president and the Congress.
New Developments and Old Issues
Although the 1967 Commission was more
successful than most governmental commissions in
leading to an important reform, and although the
value of much of its analysis has weathered the
passage of time, it seems clear that a new
Commission could now make an important
contribution to federal government budgeting. New
issues have arisen that deserve study. Moreover, it
is important to revisit some issues raised by the
1967 Commission that were never resolved. 3
Consistency. There are some instances in which
Congress and the executive branch apply different
concepts to the same budget activity. Taking a
2
1
Report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts,
1967.
The Brookings Institution
Rivlin, Alice M. and Pete Domenici. 2015. & Peterson-Pew
Commission. 2010.
3
Anderson, Barry B. 2001.
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
2
common approach would reduce confusion and
help the public and policy makers better understand
the relevant issues.
Accrual Accounting. The budget now uses accrual
concepts much more widely than in 1967. For
example, the Credit Reform Act of 1990 applied
present value accounting to loan guarantees and
direct lending. Accrual accounting is also used for
military pensions in the Pentagon budget. The wider
use of accrual accounting has added to the
importance of controversies regarding the methods
used to calculate accruals. Those controversies
need to be resolved, as well as the general
question—should accrual accounting be used even
more widely?
Public-Private Enterprises. The 1967 Commission
wrestled with the problem of properly displaying the
activities of enterprises that have mixed public and
private purposes and yet are owned by private
shareholders. This issue has never been resolved
satisfactorily, and it has gained urgency with the
creation of a government conservancy for two very
large government-sponsored mortgage enterprises:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There are also
issues involved in displaying in the budget the
activities of purely public companies such as
Amtrak.
Fees and Tax Expenditures. The definitions of
expenditures and revenues have been muddied by
the expansion in the number of tax expenditures
and by the increased use of fees and premiums to
finance governmental activities. According to some
estimates, the value of tax expenditures has grown
as much as one trillion dollars. 4 While a “tax
expenditure” is generally interpreted to mean a
narrowly defined exemption, credit or deduction that
is the functional equivalent of government spending,
there is debate over whether some items are tax
expenditures or appropriate tax policy. Such issues
need to be resolved in the presentation of the
budget.
Some may question the need for a new
Commission when we already have technical
advisors providing accounting recommendations on
the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board,
(focusing on the federal government), the Financial
Accounting Standards Board, (focusing on the
private sector), and the Government Accounting
Standards Board, (focusing on state and local
government). Why, it is asked, can’t these bodies
supply the advice necessary to resolve conceptual
4
Burman, Leonard E., Christopher Geissler, and Eric J. Toder.
2008. & OECD. 2010. & Congressional Budget Office. 2013.
The Brookings Institution
issues in federal budgeting?
Such bodies may indeed be useful in providing
technical advice when the government is issuing
technical documents, such as the financial reports
required annually for every federal agency. But the
budget is more than a technical document—it is
meant to show what the government is doing and
must be able to communicate that to the public and
policy makers. Its function of informing non-budget
experts means that it may need to contain concepts
that seem imprecise and inconsistent to an
accounting expert, but can be understood by nonexperts. Therefore, the government’s technical
boards are not sufficient to resolve the many
conceptual issues that must be addressed in the
budget. For this reason a new Commission on
Budget Concepts comprised of both technical
experts and lay people is needed. Only such a
Commission can best judge where to draw the line
between technical precision and understandability.
A Sampling of Conceptual Issues
This paper does not pretend to provide a
complete list of issues that might be considered by
a new Commission, but considers a sample of
important issues that should definitely draw the
Commission’s interest. Moreover, we believe that a
Commission should take a pragmatic approach and
not recommend a radical restructuring of the entire
budget, such as requiring that all expenditures and
revenues be computed on an accrual basis. Past
changes in budget concepts have been undertaken
pragmatically, and that should continue. We also
believe that cash accounting should remain
dominant in the budget because cash accounting is
easier for most to understand. For the most part,
the budget follows cash accounting rules, and cash
concepts have only been abandoned when they are
extremely misleading.
The main issues that we recommend the
Commission consider fit within three broad
categories: the proper scope of the budget, the
definition of spending and revenues, and
techniques for displaying budget items, so that the
economic impacts of these issues can be better
understood.
Scope of the Budget
As the 1967 Commission recommended, the
budget should encompass the full scope of federal
programs
and
public-private
entities.
The
Commission suggested certain broad criteria to help
make such determinations. For example, who owns
an entity and selects the managers? Does the
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
3
Congress and the President have control over an
entity’s program and budget, or are its policies set
primarily in response to the goals of its private
owners while ignoring the pursuit of broader public
purposes?
Despite the broad scope of the 1967
Commission’s guidelines, they do not clarify the
appropriate budgetary treatment of certain
partnerships between the federal government and
the private sector. A new Commission needs to
address this. Still, it is particularly difficult to deal
with government sponsored enterprises (GSEs),
such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are
owned privately but have dual public and private
roles. Some of their directors are appointed by the
government. Moreover, government guarantees
cover only a tiny portion of their potential liabilities,
but it is generally believed by those who follow the
activities of GSEs that they will be bailed out by
taxpayers if they run into financial trouble—exactly
what happened during the Great Recession. A new
Commission may be able to devise measures of the
risks that such institutions impose on the taxpayer
thus making an implicit guarantee more transparent.
Some new entities that mix private and public
purposes may be created soon. For example, there
are many proposals for an infrastructure bank with
different plans having different degrees of private
involvement. To the extent that such entities
proliferate, it becomes more important to decide
how they should be handled in budget documents.
Somewhat
different
issues
arise
with
enterprises that are wholly owned by the U.S.
government but are not now on budget. For
example, the business operations of Amtrak are
generally excluded from the federal budget, but
Amtrak’s board members are appointed by the
President, its preferred stock is owned by the
Department of Transportation, and the federal
government controls the routes that Amtrak uses. In
addition, Amtrak has not earned any profits in its
more than 40 years of existence. The Nation’s
economic system would not permit any truly private
entity to last under those conditions. Other
examples of hybrid public/private entities include
the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and
agricultural marketing boards. Any subsidies to
such entities are on budget, but the Commission
might consider including their gross revenues and
spending in budget totals.
If lawmakers determine that the federal budget
should continue to exclude such entities, then
perhaps a new or more complete list of criteria
should be developed to better distinguish between
federal and non-federal entities for budgetary
The Brookings Institution
purposes.
There was a time when some agencies, such as
the Export-Import Bank, were “off-budget,” but this
has become less frequent in recent years. However,
the Social Security system and the U.S. Post Office
are now officially off-budget. Nevertheless, the
deficit concept that gets most attention is the unified
budget deficit, and this includes the operations of
Social Security trust funds. Being off-budget is
mainly important for procedural reasons. For
instance Social Security cannot be subjected to
reconciliation, a procedure that can be used to
reform other entitlements. As a general rule, we do
not believe that the Commission should get into
such matters of budget process, but Social Security
is the government’s single largest program, and
giving it a special status that makes reform more
difficult seems hard to justify.
Should the budget identify some costs of
regulation? Regulation is often a close substitute for
a government spending program when used to
mandate that private or state and local sectors
spend to achieve social or economic goals. A
committee to examine the budget process, created
by the Bipartisan Policy Center and headed by
former Senator Pete Domenici and Brookings
Institution scholar Alice Rivlin, has suggested that
analyses of regulatory costs should be part of the
budget process. 5 Reflecting such costs in the
budget itself would be difficult conceptually, but that
doesn’t make them any less real. The Commission
might consider addressing regulation by adding a
budget document that reports on cost and benefit
studies of some of the most important regulations
issued each year. This would at least provide useful
information to the public and lawmakers considering
the budget.
Defining Spending and Revenues
Over the past 30 or more years the distinction
between taxes and spending has become muddled.
Maintaining a consistent and clear distinction in the
budget between spending and taxes would give
lawmakers and the public a more accurate picture
of the size of the federal government and the
amount of budgetary resources it obligates.
Tax Expenditures. For example, the tax code is
riddled with credits against tax liabilities, as well as
deductions and exclusions from taxable income that
are intended to encourage taxpayers to pursue a
diverse array of public policy goals. Often, the goals
could be pursued equally well by spending
5
Rivlin, Alice M., Pete Domenici. 2015.
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
4
programs, and tax expenditures are the equivalent
of such spending. But these tax credits, exclusions,
and deductions generally show up in the budget as
a revenue reduction and so can give a misleading
impression of government activity to the public and
lawmakers. There is an exception to this rule: if a
tax credit exceeds a taxpayer’s other tax liabilities
and is deemed to be “refundable”, a money
payment is made to the taxpayer. That payment
appears on the spending side of the budget. If the
entire value of credits, deductions, and exclusions
was considered to be spending, government would
appear to be much larger relative to the size of the
economy, and there would be a clearer sense of
government priorities.
Tax credits now exist for such diverse activities
as the production of alternative fuels, reforestation,
education, and income support. There are
deductions for mortgage interest, state and local tax
payments and charities among other things.
Municipal bond interest is excluded from income,
and the list of special tax provisions goes on and
on.
But there is a certain arbitrary element in the
definition of a “tax expenditure”. Most commonly it
is defined as any departure from a pure income tax
with a specified rate structure. 6 Alternatively, it
could be defined as a departure from a pure
consumption tax with a specified rate structure. A
commission might decide to use more than one
definition of tax expenditures and, regardless of the
definition, it would have to decide on the best way
to display them.
Offsetting Collections. The distinction between
revenues and offsetting collections, which are
treated as offsets to spending, is also a concern.
Offsetting collections from the public typically are
linked to a business-type activity or service provided
to the public by a federal agency. In the budget
process, they are distinguished from revenues
collected under the federal government’s sovereign
power to tax or regulate. Over the years, laws have
been enacted that classify certain revenues as
offsetting collections. However, revenues that are
improperly classified as an offset to spending
provide a distorted picture of government finances.
A prominent example are the fees collected by
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
These fees should be classified as revenues, not as
offsetting collections, because they are collected
(as are other taxes) under the government’s
sovereign powers, not because they are associated
6
OECD, 2010; Congressional Budget Office, 2013.
The Brookings Institution
with a business-type transaction. However, laws
have been enacted requiring some of the fees to be
counted as offsetting collections and credited to the
appropriation account for SEC salaries and
expenses, although some existing SEC fees are
recorded as governmental receipts (that is,
revenues). Another example involves the premiums
collected for Medicare Part B. They are classified as
offsetting receipts, and Medicare outlays are often
reported net of those fees. This significantly
understates the scale and economic importance of
the program. 7
Budget Displays That Clarify the
Economic Impact of Different Types
of Spending
The 1967 Commission called for developing
budget concepts that provide “the public with
information about the national economy essential
for private business, labor, agriculture, and other
groups.” 8 This is as much an issue today as it was
50 years ago. The same dollar outlays spent on
different programs can have very different effects
on aggregate demand in the economy in the short
run and on economic efficiency in the long run. It is
impractical to account for all of these differences in
budget displays, but there are cases in which the
differences are so extreme that it may be useful to
account for them differently.
Purchases of Securities. Take government
purchases of private securities, including corporate
bonds and equities, as an example. Such
purchases are a part of some proposals to reform
Social Security. Under current budgetary guidelines,
purchases of private financial securities are
recorded as cash outlays; the sales of the securities
and returns on them (such as dividends and interest
payments) are recorded as offsetting receipts. The
budgetary treatment is the same for investments in
private financial securities as it is for investments in
non-financial assets. 9
On the one hand, important distinctions exist
between financial and non-financial assets. In
general, financial assets are acquired to generate a
7
For a detailed discussion, see “Federal User Fees: Key
Considerations for Designing and Implementing Regulatory
Fees.” GAO. 2015. & “Federal User Fees: A Design Guide.”
GAO. 2003.
8
Report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts.
1967.
9
For more information, see “Evaluating and Accounting for
Federal Investment in Corporate Stocks and Other Private
Securities.” CBO. 2003.
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
5
flow of income rather than to provide public
services, such as national security, health care, or
recreation.
That
distinction
suggests
that
government purchases of private equities should be
treated differently in the budget than purchases of
nonfinancial assets. On the other hand, if equity
purchases were not counted as outlays, the budget
would not accurately reflect the level of the federal
government’s ownership and control of private
sector assets. That omission would seem to violate
one of the fundamental principles of the 1967
Commission—that the budget should reflect the true
extent of the government’s interactions with the
economy. The differences in the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) and Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) treatments of the federal
government’s receivership of Fannie Mae and its
impact on the economy is another example of the
importance of having an accepted principle for the
government’s acquisition of financial assets.
Trust Funds. The federal government accounts for
its activities through two broad groups of funds:
federal funds and trust funds. In general, trust funds
are created in law to earmark receipts for specific
programs and purposes. The General Accounting
Office in 2001 identified more than 200 trust funds
in the federal budget, although fewer than a dozen
account for the vast majority of trust fund receipts
and spending. 10
There are other ways to track whether an
earmarked tax is sufficient to fund a program, and
calling the current approach a “trust” fund is terribly
misleading. For example, the Social Security
program could be operated without a trust fund, and
it would have exactly the same economic impact
and the same effect on the unified deficit. Yet, when
people see that a trust fund has considerable
assets, they may conclude that the related program
is financially healthy, even though the assets do not
come close to financing future obligations.
Federal trust funds differ significantly from
private-sector trust funds. For example, claims
against a private trust fund are limited by the value
of the fund’s assets. By contrast, federal trust funds
function as accounting mechanisms that record tax
receipts, user fees, and other credits and
associated expenditures. When trust fund receipts
exceed expenditures, the government’s books show
trust fund balances growing. However, those
balances are claims on the Treasury that, when
redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes,
10
“Federal Trust and Other Earmarked Funds: Answers to
Frequently Asked Questions.” GAO. 2001.
The Brookings Institution
borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or
other expenditures.
Further, the beneficiary of a private trust fund
usually owns the fund’s income and often owns its
assets. The trustees of the fund also have a
fiduciary responsibility to manage the fund on behalf
of its beneficiaries and cannot make unilateral
changes to the provisions governing the trust. In
contrast, federal trust funds are generally owned by
the federal government. They are created by law,
and lawmakers can change those laws or repeal
them.
Those and other distinctions between federal
and private trust funds create confusion among
lawmakers and the public and cause some to argue
that the spending and revenues credited to federal
trust funds should be treated differently in the
budget process and, as noted above, be completely
off budget. That argument puts pressure on
lawmakers to favor those trust funds in their annual
budgetary deliberations and potentially limits their
flexibility in setting broad budget policies and
priorities. Trust revolving funds can create yet
another source of confusion when they are
established as a mechanism to disguise the use of
offsetting receipts to fund spending directly without
going through the appropriation process.
Capital Investments. It is obvious that capital
investments by the government have a very
different impact on the economy than do current
expenditures. Assuming that the investments are
well allocated, they add to productivity growth and
improvements in living standards in the long-run.
Current expenditures may have immediate benefits
but little effect on the long run. Therefore, many
advocate that the budget should treat capital
outlays differently from current expenditures. A
presidential commission considered this topic
several years ago and recommended against
having a formal capital budget because of the
problem of defining “capital” and the worry that the
definition of capital would expand rapidly if it were
deemed permissible to deficit finance “capital”
spending. 11 A new Commission on Budget
Concepts should revisit this important topic and
decide whether it agrees with the previous capital
budgeting commission.
Loans and Guarantees. Subsidized direct loans by
government and loan guarantees had very different
impacts on the federal deficit under the accounting
practices used before 1990, even though the two
11
Report of The President’s Commission to Study Capital
Budgeting, 1999.
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
6
types of programs had very similar economic
impacts. Direct loans increased the deficit
significantly in the short run and decreased it in the
long run when loans were repaid. Guarantees
tended to increase the deficit in the long run and
might reduce deficits in the short run if a guarantee
fee was levied. The Credit Reform Act of 1990 put
the two types of credit assistance on an equal basis
by requiring that present value accounting be used
to compute the value of subsidies inherent in both
types of programs. Although this was a positive
change, questions have arisen over whether the
estimating procedures could be improved. For
example, there is considerable controversy over the
discount rate that should be used in estimating
present values. In particular, should the discount
rate add a risk premium when repayments are
uncertain?
There is an off-budget account that finances the
cash flows related to credit programs. 12 If it is
depleted, it is an indication that CBO has been
underestimating the cost of credit programs. Any
deficit is covered by an automatic indefinite
appropriation. But is this appropriate? Or should
Congress have to explicitly recognize a deficit by
voting on an appropriation bill?
It has often been suggested that accrual
concepts be expanded to cover other areas of the
budget. Insurance programs are similar to credit
programs in many respects, although for some it
would be extremely difficult to estimate present
values. A more radical suggestion would use
present value accounting for entitlements that
promise benefits long into the future, e. g. Social
Security.
Macroeconomic Impacts. Recently, congressional
rules have been amended to require an analysis of
the macroeconomic impacts of major tax and
spending proposals (e.g., “dynamic scoring”). A new
Commission might consider the methods that
should be used and how the results might be
displayed in the budget.
Composition of the Commission
The 16 members of the 1967 Commission
represented a diversity of backgrounds and
experience. Three were business executives; three
were government officials and a former Secretary of
the Treasury; four were sitting members of
Congress (the chairmen and ranking members of
12
Technically, the account is not said to be off budget. Rather
it is “below the line” in that its deficit does not affect the
computation of the unified budget deficit.
The Brookings Institution
the House and Senate Appropriations Committees);
four were academic experts; and one was a
journalist. The Commission had a staff of five who
were assisted by contributions from staff members
from various federal and non-federal organizations,
and the Commission completed its work in about
seven months.
Although the topic of budget concepts may
seem dry and technical to most Americans, and
even lawmakers, almost all of the issues raised
above have an important political dimension. How
the budget is organized, and its components are
defined and represented, gives a particular
impression about how much money government
raises and spends, and what it does with that
money. So clarifying the way the budget is arranged
and defining budget items can have important
implications. Moreover, resolving such concepts
and definitions necessarily favors some government
programs over others. Consequently, it will take a
major effort to sell the conclusions of the
Commission to the Congress, business community,
labor interests, academics and the general public.
Having a diversity of interests and talents on the
Commission will be important in achieving that end.
The 1967 Commission was a bipartisan
presidential commission. Now that the Congress
has its own budget process, both the president and
the Congress should have the opportunity to
appoint members.
Conclusion
It is time to examine the fundamental budget
concepts that underlie the federal budget process.
Those concepts have not been comprehensively
reviewed since the president’s 1967 Commission on
Budget Concepts. The 1967 guidelines leave
unanswered a number of thorny questions about
the budgetary treatment of modern budget
legislation.
The answers to those questions have
significant implications for some major budget
policy proposals, including Social Security reform,
and how those proposals should be accounted for
in the federal budget. How proposals are
accounted for influences lawmakers’ and the
public’s
reaction
to
proposed
reforms.
Consequently, these issues should not be left to
budget technicians and scorekeepers to try to
resolve—a broader and more authoritative
approach is needed. The best approach would be
to create a new Commission on Budget Concepts
that could sort through the various options and that
has the standing to make recommendations,
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
7
similar to what the president’s Commission did 50
years ago. Such an approach would help
lawmakers
review
conceptual
issues
comprehensively and could help promote a
consensus on how those issues should be
resolved.
— Barry Anderson is an independent consultant
on budget issues. He has served in senior positions
at the Office of Management and Budget, the
Congressional Budget Office, and at other U.S. and
international organizations.
— Rudolph G. Penner is an Institute Fellow at
the Urban Institute and a former director of the
Congressional Budget Office. He has held a
number of posts in the Executive Branch of
government.
The Brookings Institution
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
8
References
Anderson, Barry B. Federal Budget Process Structural Reform. Testimony to the Committee on the Budget,
US House of Representatives. July 19, 2001. Web.
Burman, Leonard E., Christopher Geissler, and Eric J. Toder. “How Big Are Total Individual Income Tax
Expenditures, and Who Benefits from Them?” The American Economic Review 98.2 (2008): 79–83. Web.
Evaluating and Accounting for Federal Investment in Corporate Stocks and Other Private Securities. Rep.
Congressional Budget Office. 1 Jan. 2003. Web.
The Distribution of Major Tax Expenditures in the Individual Income Tax System. Rep. Congressional
Budget Office. 2013. Web
Evaluating and Accounting for Federal Investment in Corporate Stocks and Other Private Securities. Rep.
United States Government Accountability Office. January, 2003. Web.
Federal Trust and Other Earmarked Funds: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Rep. United States
Government Accountability Office. January, 2001. Web.
Federal User Fees: A Design Guide. Rep. United States Government Accountability Office. May, 2008.
Web.
Federal User Fees: Key Considerations for Designing and Implementing Regulatory Benefits. Rep. United
States Government Accountability Office. September, 2015. Web.
OECD, Tax Expenditures in OECD Countries. Rep. OECD Publishing. January 5, 2010. Web.
Peterson-Pew Commission, Getting Back in the Black: A Report of the Peterson-Pew Commission on
Budget Reform, Washington, DC, November 2010.
Report of the President’s Commission on Budget Concepts. Rep. United States Government Printing
Office. 1967. Web.
Report of The President’s Commission to Study Capital Budgeting. Rep. United States Government
Printing Office. September 30, 1999. Web.
Rivlin, Alice M. and Pete Domenici, Proposal for Improving the Congressional Budget Process. Rep. The
Bipartisan Policy Center. July, 2015. Web.
The Brookings Institution
Time for a New Budget Concepts Commission
9